Shut Up and Shoot

In our 9th instalment of Single Camera DVP lectures, we looked into the importance of sound, and how it can be used to make or break your work. For starters, we watched a DVD called the Shut Up and Shoot Documentary Guide. Unfortunately I couldn’t find all of it on youtube, however here is a five minute clip from the Guide, highlighting what I think are the most important areas of the whole film.

I documentary highlights something that I was beginning to understand from my own film making experiences, that Audio is more important than Video. As crazy as this sounds, the eyes lie when the ears do not. We were shown in the full video how to deal with the issues of sound recording when you’re live filming. If you are an amateur film maker, I’d recommend buying this guide.

Overdubbing a Scene from House on Haunted Hill

Our task for the session was to overdub a scene from the film, House on Haunted Hill. We were told to go and acquire the mp3 recording devices from our media centre and record the spoken audio from the scene using replacement actors. We had to watch out for certain things when we where recording the audio, such as traffic noise, the sound recorders worst enemy! Other issues such as birds singing, drunken students rambling and the dreaded mobile phone ringtones, where to be avoided. In the end we returned to our point of origin, the Mac Lab, and as the others groups had gone to find a quiet place to record, ironically the Mac Lab was quiet, and so we began!

The cast was chosen, as the scene had only 3 different speakers, and our group consisted of five, we had difficulty forcing roles on people! In the end however we decided that would play Frederick Loren (Vincent Price), Rachael would play Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig) while Muzzy would play Lance Shroeder (Richard Long).

After a few false starts, we managed to get the script written down and a dialogue going at about the right speed. We took several copies of the dialogue just to make sure, and the got to work putting it on the computer and over the old audio.